If I read The Sound and the Fury or Middlemarch, I'm filled with the aromas of either book, with past readings and relationships t...o the characters, with a whole continent of language and scenes, but the books don't frighten me. I can enter into their dream songs, and leave at my own will. But if I'm watching Casablanca on the wall, I'll let my eye slip past the phony details, the studio-bound streets, the laughable sense of a fabricated city, and drift into that dream of Humphrey Bogart and Rick's Cafe Americain, which exists outside any laws of physics, like the eternal dream of Hollywood itself, a little dopey, but with a power we can't resist.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle- class w...orld, and everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »